Philosophy

“Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”

Stewart Brand

Cofounder, the Long Now Foundation

The last Whole Earth Catalog came out in 1971, but in the fall of 1974 I published the Whole Earth Epilog. The back cover had an image of Earth from space, just a crescent with a bright sun on the horizon. There was also a big photo of a random road with a random railroad track, and above it were the words “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” Steve Jobs later described it as being a scene that a hitchhiker might encounter, and it’s interesting that he would pick that up, because that’s exactly what it was.

In 1990, Steve and I did an event for the Library of Congress. Afterward I sent him a signed copy of the Epilog. That’s when I found out he was taking “Stay hungry. Stay foolish” as a mantra, this thing that I’d kind of tossed off back in the day. We never talked about it, but I think Steve was trying to keep some continuity with his youthful self and his youthful ideals. He may have taken it as a kind of core statement of hippiedom, a way to deal first with fame, then power, and then quite a lot of fortune.

Steve was too young to have been a hippie, of course. He almost missed the parade. But clearly he followed that track anyway—dropping out of school, wandering off to India barefoot in blue jeans. By the time of the Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s, Whole Earth had moved on. Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters had moved on. But Silicon Valley kind of throbbed with expectations, with permission to be original and creative. Stanford Research Institute was there, and so was the Stanford AI Lab and Xerox PARC. Steve was in the thick of the transition from druggy hippiedom to countercultural, sophisticated hackerdom. That part he did not miss.

Screenshots from the 1984 Super Bowl ad

Advertising

The 1984 Super Bowl Ad

Alex Bogusky

Founding partner of ad firm Crispin Porter + Bogusky

Before Apple’s 1984 Macintosh ad, companies were happy to run commercials during the Super Bowl. Afterward, they had to run “Super Bowl commercials.” That legendary spot ushered in the notion that a company could alter its fortunes in just 60 seconds. It is widely considered the greatest commercial ever.

The year helped. Advertising was still largely a conventional, Madison Avenue affair in 1984. And the conventional thinking was that no agency would go near the dark, Orwellian overtones of 1984. Wrong emotions for an ad. But Chiat/Day was no conventional agency. Based in Los Angeles and led by creative director Lee Clow, the firm was helping to establish the West Coast style of advertising, marked by a new wave of filmmakers and rock music. In Steve Jobs, Clow had a fellow California upstart ready to take on the establishment. With a then-unheard-of budget of $900,000, Clow hired Ridley Scott, who was fresh off of Blade Runner, to direct.

The spot opened with a cinematic vision darker than anything we had been trained to expect from a commercial—sullen worker drones marching in lockstep. It was, well, Orwellian. But then there was a flash of color, a runner, gone almost too quickly for the mind to register. Then she reappeared, pursued and outnumbered but running with purpose—the empowered individual leading the rebellion. We didn’t know who she was or what the ad was about; we just knew that we wanted her to prevail. When she released that hammer, we were hooked.

Why did the ad work so well? Because it wasn’t about the features of a Macintosh. In fact, we never even saw a computer. Instead, it was about emotions, about how the Mac could change our relationship with computers. That was the only message that mattered, so that was all the ad was concerned with.

Apple parted ways with Chiat around the same time the company forced Jobs out. But when he returned in 1997, Jobs rehired the firm, and Clow helped reinvigorate the Apple brand with the “Think different” and “I’m a Mac” campaigns. As they had in 1984, Jobs and Clow homed in on the one sentiment that mattered for this brand and left the rest out. One ad. One idea. Again and again.

Illustration: Susan Kare

Life Story

Steve Jobs and the Hero’s Journey

George Lucas

Filmmaker

Steve Jobs had a vision. He believed in something that no one could see, and he followed that path wherever it led him, against all odds and against all doubters. Along the way he had real hurdles to overcome and real drama. He took his vision and built it into a company, but the people running the company couldn’t see it. His own board didn’t understand what he was doing. That’s when the evil emperor thwarted him, you might say, and threw him into the dungeon.

At NeXT, Steve was in a sort of purgatory. I don’t think NeXT was his primary vision—it was just what he could do at the time. He bought Pixar from me around then, too, but I think Pixar was just something that fascinated him—not something that drove him. Eventually the drought and famine and locusts descended upon Apple and they called him back.

That’s when his story really became the hero’s journey. He returned and reinstituted his vision. People were still confused and amazed and didn’t really understand what he wanted to do. But a lot of the doubters were gone, and he created an army—one that was loyal to him, that believed in him. These were the people who actually did the amazing work. Steve was taking people where they had never gone before, and all he could say was “Trust me.”

That kind of leadership—leadership with a vision that is bigger than any organization or any individual—doesn’t happen all the time. But heroes and the stories about heroes center on this, a person with a vision of a different life, of other possibilities, of boldly going where no one has gone before, to quote another franchise.

Photo: Getty

Design

The First Mouse

David Kelley

Founder, IDEO

Steve cared about everything. He had this vigilance. He wanted to delight the user.

My team and I had the privilege of designing the first commercial mouse with Steve. I remember that our original prototype used a steel ball, and when you rolled it on the table it could be fairly loud. Steve said that was unacceptable, so we had to coat the ball in rubber, which was a project in itself. But that kind of feedback is a dream for designers—that somebody cares that much.

Picture the normal situation, where we are designing something for a company. The CEO cares about the product, but not in the way that I and the other designers do—about all the tiny little details that make up the experience. They’re not concerned with the coatings on the screws or how something feels in your hand. Steve was.

In many ways that was his biggest influence: He showed how important it is to pay attention to every aspect of every product. And in doing so, he set the bar for what great design can and should be. Everybody else has had to step up, and they’ve had to keep on stepping up. Steve demonstrated that design can lead a company to greatness.

Photo: Sarah Lee/eyevine/Redux

Presentation

Master of the Stage

Penn Jillette

Professional magician; cohost, Penn & Teller Tell a Lie

Steve Jobs is famous for his keynotes. And of course he was wonderful when he unveiled the iCloud and the iPad 2 earlier this year. But by then, he was already “Steve Jobs.” At some point, when the Rolling Stones walk onstage, people cheer. But in 1984, he still had to earn it. And he did it with pure showbiz.

Even then, in that first keynote when he introduced the Mac, Steve Jobs knew the importance of keeping secrets and the element of surprise. Everybody thinks they outgrow that. The film industry has decided that surprise doesn’t matter at all—they’ll show you the “Luke, I’m your father” moment in the trailer. But as a magician, I think about the use of secrets and surprise all the time. It’s astonishing how well they work. What I find so fascinating is that, while Jobs was sophisticated and the ideas he was selling were deeply intellectual, he was using tactics that play right into our monkey brains.

He structured this announcement so well. He’s got something in a bag. And the word bag is funny, it’s humble. It is also not a clichè. Box would have been a clichè. Holding it in my hand would have been a clichè. But bag makes it so personal and honest and childlike. And then he takes the computer out of the bag and it speaks—and it refers to Jobs as its father, which anthropomorphizes it and makes it cute and gentle.

If you gave that routine to any other CEO, they would say, “I need 30 more jokes in there.” But Jobs had the confidence not to do that. When Teller and I first played off-Broadway, it was wonderful to go onstage and start our show kind of slowly and easily, knowing that in 50 minutes the audience was going to like us. And Jobs was the same way that day in 1984. He didn’t come in clapping his hands and going, “Whoa whoa whoa, have we got something for you!” He knew that the way to do it is nice and easy and slow.

Dai Vernon, who revolutionized magic in the 20th century, said that onstage, movements should be natural. That’s something that very few people in magic understand and very few public speakers understand. But Jobs follows that completely. There’s nothing about the way he moves that you wouldn’t do in a living room. Watch the way he pulls the disk out of his pocket and slides it into the front of the Mac. It’s not too slick. He slides it in like bread into a toaster.

So: He didn’t do too much buildup. He let the surprise sell itself. He did just a few jokes and he did them very well. And then he got the fuck off the stage. You could structure a 15-minute magic show exactly the same way.

Illustration: Susan Kare

Fonts

The Typographer’s Dream

Rick Valicenti

Founder, Thirst

In the late ’80s, we moved into a new loft studio. On day two I showed up to discover a body-sized, body-shaped hole in the drywall. Someone had broken in and stolen the massive IBM computers we used for accounting and administrative tasks. As replacements, we purchased the little Mac SE. We referred to it as R2-D2.

The first project we did was a poster for the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, promoting a T-shirt contest. At the time, I was looking closely at the design work of April Greiman, an early adopter of Apple technology, and wondering, where did she get that type? I learned quickly, as soon as I turned on the Mac, that the font was called Geneva, and I immediately used it for the museum poster. That was my first Mac typesetting job.

I felt liberated and could do just about anything with that machine and the models that followed. To this day, it’s just mind-blowing, the revolution that Steve Jobs set off. Obviously, the seminal experience he had in that calligraphy class at Reed College opened his eyes to the nuances of typography—and that led him to transform and refine the way we communicate.

The typesetting development software that is now available for use on Apple’s platform is so precise that today’s typographers can make adjustments within fractions of a point. This precision has encouraged the highest level of typographic craft in history.

The intuitive operating systems Jobs created have democratized font design. Right now there’s an avalanche of incredibly beautiful typefaces from all over the world that could only be designed on a Mac. Typography, like music, is an art form that embodies a time and place and culture. When type designers plot points on the Mac, they record our moment in time—all in the contour of a letterform.

Illustration: Susan Kare

Music

The Magic of 99 Cents

Chris Anderson

Editor in Chief, Wired

In the annals of behavioral economics, 99 cents holds almost mystical status—there’s a reason why 99-cent stores are so ubiquitous. A consumer’s decision to buy is based on a combination of mental and monetary calculations, most of which are driven by the fact that we’re lazy, risk averse, bad at math, and cheap. A price of 99 cents has the virtue of appearing almost risk-free (“just pennies”), and, even better, when we combine multiple items at 99 cents we tend to do a strange multiply-by-zero mental leap that discounts them all. In our emotional shopping cart, many items at 99 cents still register as “just pennies,” at least until we get to the checkout and see the total, at which point we’re already invested enough in the purchase to push the button.

When Steve Jobs launched the iTunes Music Store in 2003, the message from the integrated iPod/iTunes experience was all about simplicity, beginning with that single price: 99 cents per track, from classical to calypso. One click, one price, done. For those who valued their time, buying a song from Apple could effectively be cheaper than digging around on a file-trading site and a lot lower risk, too. Only Apple and Jobs had the clout to get all the major labels to go along with this, something that would turn out to be as important to the iPod’s success as its design and technology.

It worked brilliantly. Today piracy is down, digital music sales are up, and kids ask for iTunes gift cards for their birthday. In retrospect, the genius of Jobs’ tyrannical insistence on 99 cents showed the three great virtues of that price.

First, it’s easy. We don’t have to think about whether this particular song is worth this particular price. All songs cost the same. Rather than two variables to consider—quality and cost—you have just one. Anytime you make a consumer think, it’s easier for them to walk. A 99-cent flat fee requires no thought.

Second, it’s real money. The problem with most micropayment schemes of a few pennies or microcents is that they all have the psychological barriers of a regular price (“Is it worth it?” “Do I really want it that much?” “Can I find it cheaper elsewhere?”) without the commensurate revenue. Ninety-nine cents, by contrast, has the physiological profile of pennies but the revenue of dollars.

Finally, it was a lot cheaper than an album and a welcome reversal of music pricing trends. A decade earlier, the labels had used the vinyl-to-CD transition as an opportunity to jack up prices. Ninety-nine cents broke that. It wasn’t a price commonly associated with music in record stores, so there was no easy point of comparison. Even better, from Jobs’ perspective, it would put pressure on the labels to right their pricing wrongs in an era when the marginal cost of delivering music had fallen to zero. “It’s a little bit of a counterbalance to the labels overpricing the albums, because customers will buy just the singles,” Jobs told Billboard in 2004. “The labels have an incentive to price the albums attractively in light of the 99-cent singles.”

Once flat-rate pricing proved that the iTunes model worked and acclimated people to buying music, Jobs relented and moved to the next chapter of economic theory. In 2009, iTunes introduced variable pricing for singles, by which labels could price hits higher and back-catalog music lower. Even then, only three prices were allowed—$1.29, $0.99, and $0.69—simplicity was still a virtue. Today, despite the pricing flexibility, the majority of iTunes music is still priced at $0.99. That price really is magic.

Photo: Pixar

Animation

The Legacy of Pixar

Nick Park

Animator; four-time Oscar winner; creator, Wallace & Gromit

At Aardman, we’ve somehow managed to keep going with the old clay animation, but Pixar was like the industrial revolution. They knew the future was going this way. I remember in 1989, John Lasseter came to the Bristol Animation Festival in England. I had just made Creature Comforts, and he was our guest speaker, one of the only people I’d heard of working in computer animation. Jobs may not have been at the festivals, but we all knew that John was working with the Apple guys, and what was happening at Pixar was a collaboration.

I’d been to a couple of talks on computer animation, and it was all technicians either trying to impress you with how they could make a teapot rotate or heading for ultrarealism or virtual reality, which was equally nerdy. There was a lot of suspicion among animators, a feeling that the use of computers resulted in robotic movement without humanity. But in Bristol, Lasseter showed Luxo Jr. and Knick Knack, and here were all these funny characters, great storytelling, and stylization. Pixar aimed to make the computer a pencil in the artist’s hand. It was the flavor of the festival.

John and Steve really forged the way. After Toy Story, a lot of companies popped up trying to do the same thing, but few do it as well. Pixar’s films are the children of a successful marriage between art and technology. People are always skeptical of that relationship, but Pixar is a great example of how it can work in a fantastic way.

Illustration: Skip Sterling

Living Different

The Future

Bruce Sterling

Writer, speaker, designer, futurist

Steve Jobs was never just a “futurist.” I’m a futurist, because futurists have audiences. Jobs had users. If he’d died of cancer 20 years ago, history would have summed him up as Nikola Tesla to Bill Gates’ Thomas Edison. The guy was an eccentric, a vegetarian hippie acidhead, a Tesla-style crank whose own board purged him for being bad for business.

Jobs was far too irascible, judgmental, and competitive to be a futurist. Real futurists are long-view guys, cosmopolitan to the point of amorality. They let the little stuff slide, because history lets the little stuff slide. Steve Jobs let nothing slide. He read George Orwell, and then he commissioned a Super Bowl ad that yelled that Orwell’s 1984 would never happen because he, Steve Jobs, deemed otherwise. His design sense made him different—after dropping out of college, Jobs went to India and had a good look around at some real-deal spirituality. He renounced material goods and caught scabies and dysentery. Jobs never talked much about the lessons of that India jaunt, which inclines me to think it must have been crucial to him.

With his sly emphasis on usability, he made my life easier while subverting everything central to it: typed manuscripts; thoughtful letter-writing; obscure, hard-to-find vinyl music; long, expensive phone conversations; intensely regional creative scenes. He vaporized it all, designed it into palm-size avatars of an iCloud. Today I migrate among three cities on two continents and haul Jobs’ gizmos out of pockets and bags a dozen times a day. Think Different means Live Different, though different does not entail better. It won’t be long before every sleek gizmo Steve Jobs forged is dumped or recycled. But that won’t change his legacy: an engine of difference.

Illustration: Susan Kare

Advice

Message to the Next Generation

JT Batson

President, DDS Digital; Stanford class of 2005

The students were not exactly overjoyed that Steve Jobs was going to be the commencement speaker. Everyone wanted Bill Clinton. After all, his daughter, Chelsea, had gone to school at Stanford. So every year Clinton was not named speaker was a disappointment, no matter who it was.

Graduation is chaotic. It wasn’t until we started walking into the stadium that I even realized, hey, I’m actually graduating right now. Stanford has this tradition, the wacky walk, where everyone dresses up in different costumes or throws Frisbees or beach balls. I’m from the South, so I had a seersucker suit shipped in from back home in Georgia. Some other guys dressed up as iPods.

It was good fun. Which was an interesting contrast to Jobs’ speech. He started talking about being fired from Apple and then having cancer. How doctors told him he was going to die. How he was adopted as a baby into a family with parents who never went to college—a fascinating twist that played out over his life. There was no Apple keynote presentation to fall back on. It was revealing—very raw and very open.

He told us that he gets up every morning and looks in the mirror and asks, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” If the answer is no for too many days in a row, he said, it’s time to make a change. That really resonated and has driven a lot of my decisions since then. When I’ve reached certain points in my career where I’m not superexcited to get to work early or stay late or work on something over the weekend or all night—when I lose that excitement, then it’s probably not the right thing for me anymore.

He said, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” Exactly. Death is a great motivator. You have to get out there and do stuff, because someday you won’t be here. Of all the advice I’ve received, I rely on that the most.